I'm sure that that market segment tends towards macs, but given these constraints I'm surprised that they're not using much cheaper PCs to run the same audio suites, given the budget constraints.
This is to suggest that Broadway shows could already have achieved the same increase-in-sound-quality-per-dollar by switching to cheaper hardware running Windows, and that the M1 introduction isn't really the big sea change the author makes it out to be.
CoreAudio is native to macOS/iOS and very stable. The latency is low and most of the time you don't need to install anything: just plug an USB. It even provides APIs for running the plugins, if the DAW wants to use AU. Hell, even the built-in interfaces has good latency on Macs. Also, if you have multiple, different branded interfaces, Apple provides a tool to "merge them" so your DAW pretends it's only one.
On Windows you need an alternative third-party driver solution, ASIO, just to get proper latency. Microsoft tried DirectAudio, Kernel Audio, among other tech, but it never worked and/or never caught on. Even ASIO is not as stable as CoreAudio and requires installing (sometimes unstable) third-party driver software and control panels. IME, sometimes those drivers conflict with each other, so you can't use multiple soundcards at the same time, or swap them. Most people eventually get there, but it still feels like a house of cards.
There's a lot of small studios that choose Hackintoshes, so it's not really the hardware, although M1 might change that, who knows.
I don't know about the present state, but certainly 10 years ago you would have had to be out of your mind to use anything but a Mac in an Audio setup that is used for important live performances - the Audio and MIDI stacks on Windows were a mess compared to those in OSX.
As a former sound engineer I can state for a fact that this is not true. We stopped using Macs while I was still doing it and it was back in like ~98 when we moved for real to digital studios. Depending on what we were doing the only thing the Macs gave us were bigger purchase and support bills. What Apple had going for them was history so people didn't know as much about how to support the setup if it wasn't Macs. The non-Apple software was just fine and the hardware, at the same price point, way better.
I remember working with some Windows 7 setups and having to deal with stuff like WASAPI Drivers and ASIO4All, having to daisy chain MIDI through the out on synths (which introduced jitter) because there is only one system MIDI in and out, etc. Perhaps there was a way to get these things working smoothly, but on the Mac all this stuff just worked out of the box. My situations were probably edge cases in terms of how much gear was connected to a single computer, but still.
I think you're right that legacy, mindshare/knowledge etc played a big part in it, and I'm sure Windows is much better with this stuff now. Although the handful of studios I've been to in the last few years were still running Macs, but again maybe that's just mindshare.
A funny thing I realized recently while trying to setup OBS for video conferencing on my Mac at home (I work as a teacher occasionally): There is no way out of the box to capture system audio, you either need to do it through external hardware or use a hacky solution like Loopback. On Windows, this "just works".
1998 was before OS X was released and before Apple purchased Logic. This is when things changed for the better, while in Windows things kind of remained the same audio-wise.
This era was kind of a low point for the Mac. The dying days of both PowerPC and MacOS 9, overpriced underperforming hardware, and the slow painful transition to OS X. Things started to improve after 2006 when Apple switched to Intel.
That’s 22 years ago. Whole other era. Steve Jobs had just returned, so macs weren’t yet intel and they weren’t running OS X yet, using the NEXT architecture.
In other words, you and OP may both be right. Three absolutely massive transitions at apple between your era and theirs: hardware, software and management quality.
If you stopped using Macs before CoreAudio was invented, I don't really even know what to say, other than I'd have run away from running digital audio on an Apple II, too :)
Your bad luck was that you bailed out of the MacOS audio subsystems just when they started to get good.
"Audio and MIDI stacks on Windows were a mess compared to those in OSX" What do you mean? That sounds like its harder to write drivers for soundcards for windows.. But the user is not going to be writing their own drivers.
Any user who needs to perform audio with any computer will need a soundcard in order to have any sort of decent quality, for
#1 Decent quality inputs and outputs
#2 The correct input and output types like XLR (or fibre optic or whatever)
#3 Acceptable latency for live performance.
Soundcards are available for mac or windows, the makers provide drivers which deal with the "Audio and MIDI stacks". From a users perspective theyre both fine. After that, you care about the machines performance, CPU, how much RAM, how fast is the RAM, how fast is the SSD.
It means that Windows/Microsoft doesn't provide anything to driver writers or DAW authors.
MS tried a bunch of tech in the past (WinMM, MCIWnd, DirectSound, WaveOut, WASAPI, XAudio2, etc), but none of them ever worked for professional Audio.
The proper solution was always to use ASIO, which is third-party technology by Steinberg. It works but it's not integrated with Windows: it goes directly to the audio interface, bypassing stuff in the Kernel.
This bypass causes some limitations, such as not being able to use the system mixer (which prevents from using media players or multiple audio apps), or sometimes having different audio-interfaces not work well with each other.
There are workarounds to those issues, but they have to be handled by the interface manufacturer when writing the drivers. Also, you can't have low-latency with built-in soundcard unless you use something like ASIO4ALL, which is not super stable IME. This sucks when you want to work on-the-go with headphones.
Of course, it can be very stable when you use the right combination of DAW, drivers and sound interfaces, but when you don't you have problems.
On macOS and iOS? CoreAudio is native and it has super low latency by default. It's mostly plug and play and all apps use it. It even provides APIs to use Audio Plugins or reroute Audio, so DAW writers don't even have to write it themselves (unless they want to). Do you have multiple Audio/MIDI interface? In macOS there's a built-in app to "link" them together.
> "Broadway shows could already have achieved the same increase-in-sound-quality-per-dollar by switching to cheaper hardware running Windows"
Mac Minis are relatively cheap. Not much different in cost to comparable, branded, ultra-small-form-factor PC hardware. (And now, with the M1, I don't think you'll find competitive PC hardware in the same price range and form factor at all)
Not only are they cheap, but Mac minis are ubiquitous. Almost every major city has them instock at an Apple Store or other retailer, so it can be replaced quickly anywhere, unlike any pc vendor
I am a huge M1 fan but that statement is almost true, but not quite there yet. I have experimented with a number of prebuilt machines with AMD Ryzen 3600X/3700X, Intel i7-10700, and Apple M1. Those (esp 3700X) are often slightly ahead of M1 (esp in Rosetta) usually at slightly cheaper prices [often discounted too] compared to the base model Mac mini, admittedly at a much higher power consumption, noise, physical size. The delta increases quickly if you have to pay $200 more for only 8GB RAM (which is the max and sometimes the real bottleneck) and overpriced SSD. If you need Rosetta, you are still probably better off with a mid-range Ryzen PC, assuming you're not married to macOS.
I agree that it is at least super competitive on pricing with comparable compact HP/Dell/Lenovo 8-core desktops. This was surely not true before M1 (I'd say on the order of 2x improvement in mini price-performance).
I suspect this will remain true for a at least a little bit more since Ryzen 5xxx are beasts too, and once supply-demand gets more balanced, machine prices will likely come down at or slightly below Mac mini M1.
On the laptop side, however, M1 is glorious and way cheaper than performance-matching alternatives.
As you say, you're comparing a far higher TDP chip here (Ryzen 3600X/3700X). I don't think those can realistically fit into the Mac Mini's form factor, right? Surely we should be comparing the M1 to the "U" series Ryzen chips?
I was comparing M1 to higher TDP chips, yes. If you take TDP into account M1 wins hands down, of course (unless your workload requires more than 16GB RAM). The context of this post is specifically the price-sensitive customer, not a TDP/space-focused one (compare to this[1] for example, once you upgrade RAM and SSD, and install a decent cooler). You also get better I/O in the PC world.
Audio folks tend to be fairly sensitive to all of size/noise/heat - this sort of setup is going to end up slotted into a rack of audio equipment, after all.
macOS/CoreAudio alone probably justifies Mac mini before performance comes into play at all. To say Mac mini is cheaper than alternatives matching in CPU performance is however still incorrect, though dangerously close. That’s all.
Form factor is most important. After that, price. Then third is probably the cooling situation, though we can install some extra fans if needed. Better I/O doesn't really matter here as we only need 2-3 USB ports, Ethernet, and display.
Many professional audio software suites have historically only run on macOS. I think that’s started to change over the past 5 years. But moving from macOS to Windows is a big, big effort for most orgs.
I don't know how it was historically. But I got this typical thing where I think more software and gear will make me a better producer and thus I buy almost every big daw, software synth and all plugins I come across and have yet to find the first thing that doesn't run on windows (apart from logic pro obviously)
A lot of small-shop semi-DIY VSTs used to be Windows only. That's not so true these days. It's been a while since I found a VST/AU that wasn't at least dual platform.
But having run music on Windows for a long time, I would never ever go back. The telemetry, random updates, and general awfulness of the user experience are not something I want in my life.
MacOS has issues, not least the breaking changes in Catalina and Big Sur. But when each OS iteration settles down it's generally super-stable and - most importantly for professional use - it doesn't get in the way.
MainStage doesn't run on Windows, and it's the software all the shows use. Even shows that use Ableton Live for playback sometimes use MainStage as a frontend software controller hooked up via IAC.
Most audio software suites were historically dual-OS, or Windows only, for example, Cakewalk, AVID ProTools, and Ableton. Even Logic started as a Windows-first DAW.
Indeed, the whole point of Apple buying Logic (and discontinuing the Windows releases) was that they needed a DAW on MacOS to get audio professionals to consider the OS. People don't remember this any more, but the Apple versions of Logic were very much inferior to the Windows versions.
I hate to be that guy, but your entire comment is full of wrong.
Firstly, Emagic "Logic" started on the Atari and Mac OS platforms. I'm not sure when it appeared on Windows, but it certainly wasn't a Windows first DAW. The Apple versions of Logic were never "very much inferior" to the Windows versions. In fact, it was the other way around.
> Indeed, the whole point of Apple buying Logic (and discontinuing the Windows releases) was that they needed a DAW on MacOS to get audio professionals to consider the OS.
The fact of the matter is, practically all "audio professionals" of the time period of which you refer, used Apple computers - either for MIDI sequencing, or Digital Audio Workstations. Windows computers weren't even a serious consideration. Those who didn't, still used Ataris, or hardware sequencers/recorders.
Pro Tools, originally by Digidesign, was Mac only for years also.
Well, if you want to be technical about the history of hardware and software platforms in Hollywood, it was Atari and Silicon Graphics until the mid-1990s, when most studios switched to a combination of Windows/nix for their needs. Apple was briefly in consideration for DAWs/audio work in the late 80s/early 90s, until Windows DAWs started hitting the market in force.
Today, most Hollywood composers use Cubase, which was definitely Windows-first. TV productions favor Studio One, which again, was Windows-first (and from the same developers as Cubase). Pro Tools is industry standard for Hollywood movies...but it didn't become the standard until version 6, running on Windows. Ableton Live, which is the most popular tool for recording live music, was written first on Windows (but originally commercially released simultaneously for Windows and Apple).
And Logic on Mac was very much inferior to Logic on Windows, which is why Windows was the preferred platform for running Logic. The Mac version didn't become better than the Windows version until version 6, for which there was no Windows version. While all accounts say that Logic is a great DAW these days, because it's Mac-only, the only production companies that run Logic are ones that are exclusively Mac-based.
I'm sorry, but this is completely wrong. Furthermore, I'm not talking about the history of hardware/software in Hollywood - your original statement was about the use of software by audio professionals. I was an "audio professional". I trained as a Sound Engineer (City & Guilds 1820 Sound Engineering, and BTEC ND Music Technology), and was there, right around the time period in question. I also worked in London's West End for years, which is the equivalent of New Yorks's Broadway.
I want to be charitable, and hope you're getting confused about the "Apple" versions - in that, you're conflating when Apple (the company) bought Emagic Logic, for when Logic (the software) was available on Apple Mac OS?! Either way, doesn't make your former statements any less incorrect.
Nothing to dispute. Cubase was also available for the Atari because Atari was still the big platform for audio at the time. But it was programmed on Windows, for Windows, and the next version of Cubase (the famous one, which introduced VSTs) dropped support for Atari altogether.
Windows version didn't come until 1992, the Atari and Mac versions were released before that (Mac before Atari, however, the precursor by the same company was developed for Atari first).
Ableton Live, the only one used for live performance by any of my circles (admittedly, in the electronic music scene, not Broadway) is cross-platform.
Logic Pro is, of course, Mac-only as it's made by Apple.
We're not talking about an organization moving to Windows here, we're just talking about a single, appliance-like keyboard-input-to-audio-output computer for someone to play music on in a live Broadway show. TFA writes about buying the machine new for that single purpose. There aren't really "switching costs" in the traditional sense in that circumstance.
TBH I think it's just an ad. The circumstance (we have to buy two brand new computers for every run of a show!) and claimed impact are just too contrived.
EDIT: Further supporting the idea that it's just an ad, every other post from this domain on HN is promoting a product.
This is to suggest that Broadway shows could already have achieved the same increase-in-sound-quality-per-dollar by switching to cheaper hardware running Windows, and that the M1 introduction isn't really the big sea change the author makes it out to be.